A typical business system may include many transaction steps. The business system may also require messages be sent to different application modules within the business system. A messaging system may be used to communicate the messages to the different application modules. For example, a financial institution may use such a business system as described above which may include a payment request requiring multiple steps before the transaction is complete. One problem with current business systems, including payment requests from a financial institution, is the tracking of the transaction.
For example, when a payment request is received by a financial business system it will be submitted to a complex business process flow where the message is validated, approved, scheduled for later processing, processed and completion acknowledged to the requester. Financial institutions require tracking the movement of payment requests throughout the process.
One solution to implementing message tracking between application modules includes generating duplicate messages with state information to feed a tracking application. Another solution includes application modules generating duplicate messages and requesting messaging software to generate report messages with state information to feed a tracking application. However, one drawback to these solutions is that application modules must be aware of the tracking process and has to include computer code to request the reports or to make copies of the data for the tracking application which is invasive to the business system. Another drawback to known solutions is that the application modules need to request messaging software to generate report messages that feed the tracking application, and thus other processing is interrupted. Alternatively, the application module could interrupt the messaging software to request generation of a report message, however, this is also undesirable because the messaging software is interrupted from other processing.
Therefore, a need exists for a tracking system which is minimally invasive to existing application modules and messaging systems.